The ride began on June 6, 2016 with the arctic Dalton Highway and the Denali, Taylor and Top of the World Highways. We then crossed Canada via the Klondike, Alaska, Stewart Cassiar and Yellowhead Highways, through to the Icefields Parkway which we followed down to Banff. From there we joined the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, mostly through the cold fall months, down to Hachita, New Mexico; just short of the Mexican border.

We then headed west across the deserts of South Western USA to San Diego, arriving in early December 2016. The incredible Baja Divide came next followed by a circuitous route through Mexico’s altiplano and the southern Sierra Madre. From Chiapas, after five months in Mexico, we crossed into Peten, Guatemala then to Belize and back into Guatemala, which we crossed from east to west into the highlands. A cross country adventure through Honduras followed, then Nicaragua (briefly), Costa Rica and Panama. In late November 2017 we flew to Cuba to ride the Ruta Mala (3 weeks), and then onto Cartagena, Colombia.

We spent 4.5 months exploring Colombia before heading onto the Trans Ecuador and Tres Volcanes Mountain Bike Routes, which took us through to Peru (mid 2018) and its endless mountains and rich culture. We were enamoured with Peru, spending a year there, riding the classic bikepacking routes, as well as creating our own Camino del Puma (which entered Bolivia briefly) in the south of the country. We spent roughly four months based in Arequipa and Cusco and during the latter part of the wet season made a 6-week side trip by bike and boat to the Amazon basin, following ancient Inca roads (short film here) along the way.

Three months in Bolivia saw us visit the Cordillera Apolobamba, and following bikepacking routes to, and beyond, La Paz. We finished off Bolivia with the Lagunas Route into Chile and San Pedro de Atacama, where we then picked up the incredible Ruta de los Seis Miles (early December 2019) which took us through the Argentine puna.

From the end of the Seis Miles (Guandacol, Argentina) we zigzagged over the Andes between Argentina and Chile a further three times to Santiago. There we made a bus transfer 1000km south to Puerto Varas, in order to ride through southern Patagonia in late summer and autumn, but it was in Coyhaique, Chile that the Covid-19 pandemic put a stop to our travels and we returned to New Zealand for nearly three years.

In November 2022 we finally returned to South America, resuming the journey in Mendoza, Argentina and heading south in order to make up the latitude we’d missed on the bus. We explored the arid eastern cordillera as we headed south to Paso Pichachen, then Chile’s volcanoes towards San Martin, where we picked up the Patagonian Beer Trail. The Carretera Austral shaped most of our ride to Cochrane, but we made quite a few detours. From Cochrane we crossed over Paso Roballos, then back over Paso Rio Mayer and through to the famous peaks of El Chalten. We arrived in Ushuaia on the 28th April after a further 5 months on the road, having overlapped with very little of our original route.